Taking Follow Up To a New Height, Or a New Low?

By Sanya Weathers

On the heels of the followup column I posted last week, I came across this gem in the New York Times. (I know this blog makes hot links hard to see – just mouseover the words “this gem.”) Basically, it’s the ultimate in following up with a potential customer. Someone spends ten minutes looking at a part of shoes on one website, and a custom ad featuring those shoes appear on other websites visited by that customer.

The article itself contains a fair bit of worrying about vast networks watching your every move, privacy concerns, and whatnot. I’m a big fan of privacy and think we should be doing more as an industry to make the sharing of personal information optional and the mechanisms transparent.

But this is a no brainer. This is cookie driven advertising, and it is brilliant. It has the world’s easiest fix if you don’t like it.  (There’s another mouseover there.) This kind of ad reaches a customer that was interested enough to come to your website, but left without making a commitment. Furthermore, this kind of ad reaches the customers who did sign up/download/whatever. The presence of your ad will subconsciously assure the user that he has made a good choice. (Go to any forum for a product without a significant ad presence, and you’ll see concerns that the company isn’t really serious about success or staying power.)

As for the people who are disturbed by it, I’m willing to guess that none of them are under 30. I’m willing to bet hard cash than none of them are under 20. The generation currently making their first purchasing decisions do not know a world without ads precisely calibrated to their age, gender, and buying habits. They aren’t creeped out by the phenomenon. They expect it.